By GIANNI TRUZZI, SPECIAL TO THE P-I

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, August 17, 2006

The traditional and the modern jostle together in Echo Park, a predominantly Mexican community of East Los Angeles. While families dance to ranchera tunes at their daughters' coming-of-age celebrations, the young women themselves huddle to exchange text messages and discuss hip-hop.

Transformation runs through "Quinceañera," the inviting story of young Magdalena (Emily Rios), who is nearing the day of her own Quinceañera, the party thrown for a girl's 15th birthday that marks her passage to womanhood. But the world around her is changing, too.

Anyone in Los Angeles, or even east of Washington's Cascades, has certainly witnessed the kind of extravagant display in which Magdalena's more affluent cousin Eileen (Alicia Sixtos) basks. Dark young beauties in rampant taffeta troop for photographs and festivities in a Hummer limousine, chaperoned by male cousins and siblings on best behavior. In scale and pomp, the Quinceañera resembles a wedding, but without the unnecessary bother of a bridegroom.

While Magdalena wants the same for herself, the process of refitting Eileen's dress reveals that she is pregnant. The means are mysterious; she insists she has never "been with" her boyfriend, Herman (J.R. Cruz), a gentle young man with a promising future and a fiercely protective mother.

When her scandalized father (Jesus Castanos-Chima), the minister of a storefront evangelical church, throws her out of the house, she finds refuge in the backyard rental of her great-great-Uncle Tomas (Chalo Gonzalez). The old man already has given haven to her cousin Carlos (Jesse Garcia), a street thug also rejected by his family.

Rios brings great authenticity to her role, a status-conscious urban teen who grumbles over hand-me-downs yet is sensible at her core. She is our unwitting guide through the chain-link landscape of Echo Park, where Tomas sells hot cups of champurrado from a grocery cart as bohemian Anglos begin to move in.

The tensions of this transition play out through the white gay couple (David W. Ross and Jason L. Wood) that purchases the property and seduces the newly uncloseted Carlos.

Filmmakers Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland claim to have revived "kitchen-sink" realism, a style known for its gritty working-class stories of England's industrial north. In particular, they pay homage to Tony Richardson's 1961 "A Taste of Honey," by following a similar plot. It's an odd conceit; they don't really have the stomach for that kind of coal-fired bleakness, nor do we much miss it.

What "Quinceañera" does offer is charm, sensitivity and intelligence, the qualities that garnered it both Audience and Grand Jury awards at the Sundance Film Festival. It reminds us how traditions are confounded by change.